I am the Founder & CEO of Ideasicle, a virtual marketing-ideas company pioneering the "Expert Sourcing" model. Prior to founding Ideasicle, I worked at some of the most creative advertising agencies in the world, including Wieden & Kennedy, Goodby Silverstein & Partners, Mullen and Arnold Worldwide. It was at these agencies that my passion for ideas (having them and witnessing their birth from others) was inspired and cultivated. It's also where I found my small pool of "Experts" for Ideasicle. I am a guest lecturer at Boston University, an agency pitch consultant on the side, and speak at marketing conferences around the country about the changing marketing landscape in the context of creativity and idea generation.

Facebook Could Own The Bottom Of The Purchase Funnel - If They Would Just Ask

Facebook has built an enormous human ecosystem and, as such, is very careful about how it allows brands to advertise on its platform. The latest evidence of that is the fact Facebook is reviewing all video advertising prior to their running to assess how “meaningful” they are to Facebook users. Those that are approved and run will do so without sound so the user can ignore them if he/she wants to. And even then Facebook will continuously monitor user feedback to make sure they strike the right balance and the video ads don’t poison the well.

Now, add to the rigor behind vetting these videos Facebook’s existing ability to mine the tremendous affinity data that users themselves volunteer in the spirit of connecting with others. These carefully crafted algorithms from Facebook allow for an advertiser to target their products to the people most likely to be interested in them. It’s relevance on steroids, right?

With all this energy, time, and money going into protecting its users from irrelevant advertising, has anyone at Facebook thought to just ask?

It’s why people hate advertising.

For years I’ve had a fantasy that one day advertisers and their audiences would be on the same page. Fact is, people need and want stuff at certain times in their lives, and brands are highly motivated to sell that very same stuff. With every sale made there’s proof that consumers and brands don’t have to be at odds.

The chasm between brands and potential customers has traditionally been one of identification and reach. Identification, in that brands, when they look out their windows, see a sea of potential customers and have a hard time deciphering which ones are likely to buy their products. Reach, in that those same brands have to find ways to get the message about their products out to those masses so that some subset of people who might care will hear about the product. If there’s waste involved – reaching more people than necessary – well then so be it. It’s the cost of doing business.

But there’s been another cost: people now hate advertising because 90% of the time any given ad is utterly irrelevant to any given audience member (just making that stat up, but I bet I’m close). Advertising is annoying, seemingly unnecessary, and something that should be avoided at all costs (see the DVR, apps where you can pay to get rid of advertising, the rise of premium channels on TV, etc.). Avoiding ads is a cottage industry of our own making.

Facebook, to their immense credit, is doing its best to combat this problem of irrelevance. They are well equipped to do so. But I wonder if their technological roots are keeping them from a very human answer.

Enter, the advertising directory. 100% relevance.

Forget the algorithms and review panels, Facebook. How about just asking your users what ads they want to see? Back to my fantasy, the fact is, at any given moment, some percentage of Facebook users are in the market for automobiles, say. If Facebook were to create an “Advertising Directory,” users could actively flag products, by category, that they are in the market for or even just mildly interested in, and then brands in those flagged categories could buy access to those flag-raisers and be virtually guaranteed 100% relevance, zero waste.

The users won’t mind the advertising since they asked for it, and Facebook can refocus its energy, time, and expertise back into making the platform itself better and better.

This idea is a natural extension of what Facebook already is, and already does. Where it’s been about connecting people to each other and fostering meaningful (most times) relationships through their virtual platform, now brands can be invited into users’ lives, meaningfully connect, all with the possible outcome of a sale. We might even be able to lose the war metaphors in marketing like “conquering,” “targeting,” and “campaigns.” If you want to be “conquered,” is it a war?

Facebook becomes the universal point-of-purchase for all things.

A potential drawback of this idea is that new product categories will have a hard time breaking in. How can a user flag a category that doesn’t exist yet? I would argue that more traditional advertising still has a role in this model, even if it’s not a new category. Traditional advertising will cover the top of the funnel, or the awareness piece. Whereas Facebook, with its “Advertising Directory,” can cover (in spades) the consideration, purchase, and loyalty portions of the funnel. In fact, Facebook would essentially become the universal “point-of-purchase” for all things.

Does the Advertising Directory become integrated into the existing user experience, as the Facebook ads are today? Or could it go so far as to have its own center of gravity on the Facebook url where people go to “interact with stuff and brands.” I’ll leave questions like that to the user-experience experts at Facebook.

But no need for algorithms here. No need to review advertising prior to launching on the platform. No need to worry about offending users or driving them away.

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Or a good old fashioned marketing survey (What brands would you like to have show you their advertisements?). I have some brands whose advertisements I really would like to see, but Facebook’s (and others) inference-based way of finding potential consumers is just a fancy way to say “we are really still just guessing about all of this in the end”. None of these sites need to know my address (zip, fine) or what schools I went to or who my family members are but exactly what brands I want advertising to me? I’ll tell you directly if asked, but I won’t click those stupid pages that you aren’t going to bother showing me in the first place (reading IS engagement you @$$#*!%$). As this author says, ASK, stop guessing.

Not sure how long users will stay with Facebook, especially when there are ad free sites that offer same service as facebook and loads of more privacy. I have swithced to less known social media like Muflr – www.muflr.com and want to keep it taht way.